D. W. Griffith: The Redman and the Child (1908) (2017 digital scan 4K)

 

D. W. Griffith: The Redman and the Child (US 1908).

US 1908. Prod: American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. 

    Dir: D. W. Griffith. story: ?. photog: Arthur Marvin. cast: John Tansey, Linda Arvidson, George Gebhardt, Charles Inslee, Harry Solter. 

    Filmed: 30.6, 3.7.1908 (Passaic River, Little Falls, New Jersey). Rel: 28.7.1908. copy: DCP (4K), 15'40" (from paper print, 857 ft., 15 fps); titles: ENG. 

    Source: Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus, Culpeper, VA.

    Digital scan 2017. Given the absence of original intertitles, new ones have been written by the Film Preservation Society.

    43rd Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone.

    Grand piano: Donald Sosin.

    Viewed at Teatro Verdi with e-subtitles in Italian, 5 Oct 2024. 

Tracey Goessel (GCM, The Biograph Project 2024): "The Redman and the Child, like Dollie, was filmed entirely outdoors, in Little Falls, New Jersey. Being away from the studio permitted Griffith to play to his strengths. He not only brings his camera in closer to the players; he frees their movements. In the studio, actors only move straight left or right – staying in the camera’s focal range. Here they run toward and away from us; cut diagonally across the screen; and paddle along the Passaic River with absolute freedom. Griffith uses jump cuts not for trick effects but to permit such shots as our hero drowning one of the kidnappers. (Down he goes, and, thanks to the cut, down he stays.) We are even given a matted POV shot as the Indian looks through the surveyors’ telescope."

"This is advanced stuff for 1908, and the critical reception proved that Griffith had certainly hit the ground running." Tracey Goessel

Moving Picture World: "Alongside of a beautiful mountain stream in the foothills of Colorado there camped a Sioux Indian, who besides being a magnificent type of the aboriginal American, is a most noble creature, as kind-hearted as a woman and as brave as a lion. He eked his existence by fishing, hunting and mining, having a small claim which he clandestinely worked, hiding his gains in the trunk of an old tree. It is needless to say that he was beloved by those few who knew him, among whom was a little boy, who was his almost constant companion. One day he took the little fellow to his deposit vault, the tree trunk, and showed him the yellow nuggets he had dug from the earth, presenting him with a couple of them. In the camp there were a couple of low-down human coyotes, who would rather steal than work. They had long been anxious to find the hiding place of the Indian's wealth, so capture the boy, and by beating and torture compel him to disclose its whereabouts. In the meantime there has come to the place a couple of surveyors who enlist the services of the Indian to guide them to the hilltop. Here they arrive, set up their telescope and start calculations. An idea strikes them to allow the Indian to look through the 'scope. He is amazed at the view, so close does it bring the surrounding country to him. While his eye is at the glass one of the surveyors slowly turns it on the revolving head until the Indian starts back with an expression of horror, then looks again, and with a cry of anguish dashes madly away down the mountain side, for the view was enough to freeze the blood in his veins. Arriving at the old tree trunk, his view through the telescope is verified, for there is the result he improvised bank rifled, and the old grandfather of the little boy, who had followed the miscreants murdered. Picking the old man up he carries his lifeless form back to the camp, reaching there just after the murderers, with the boy, had decamped in a canoe. Laying the body on the sands and covering it tenderly with his shawl he stands over it and solemnly vows to be avenged. What a magnificent picture he strikes as he stands there, his tawny skin silhouetted against the sky, with muscles turgid and jaws set in grim determination. It is but for a moment he stands thus, yet the pose speaks volumes. Turning quickly, he leaps into a canoe at the bank and paddles swiftly after the fugitives. On, on goes the chase, the Indian gaining steadily on them, until at last abandoning hope, they leave their canoe and try to wade to shore as the Indian comes up. Leaping from his boat he makes for the pair, seizing one as the other swims to the opposite shore. Clutching him by the throat the Indian forces his head beneath the surface of the water and holds it there until life is extinct, after which he dashes in pursuit of the other. This proves to be a most exciting swimming race for a life. They reach the other shore almost simultaneously, and a ferocious conflict takes place on the sands terminating in the Indian forcing his adversary to slay himself with his own dagger. Having now fulfilled his vow he leaps into the water and swims back to the canoe in which sits the terrified boy, and as night falls he paddles slowly back to camp." —Moving Picture World synopsis

AA: Griffith reverses the racial child abduction situation of The Adventures of Dollie. White bandits abduct a little white boy, and a Sioux hunter saves him in Griffith's earliest portrait of the noble savage. 

Compared with The Fight for Freedom, Griffith clearly relishes shooting a Western on location again.

It is a violent and heartbreaking story. The bandits torture a child and murder his grandfather. The Sioux is guiding a couple of surveyors to a mountain top. They have a telescope, and the Sioux sees for the first time his home country at long distance precision. Moving the telescope "in a panoramic shot" the Sioux also witnesses the robbery of his tree-trunk treasure cache by the bandits and the murder of the boy's grandfather. This is an inspired, purely cinematic scene.

The final fight with the surviving bandit is brutal and ferocious. It ends with the bandit perishing by his own knife.

Griffith is making quick progress as a cinematic storyteller.

...

I saw The Redman and the Child in The Griffith Project (DWG 30) screening in Pordenone on 15 October 1997, a 35 mm print from a Library of Congress paper print, 16 min at 15 fps with intertitles missing, with Antonio Coppola at the grand piano. I was revolted by the brutal battery of the child in the hands of the bandits. I was impressed by the point-of-view conducted bý the long distance view of the telescope. It was also startling when the little boy witnesses his kidnapper being drowned by the Sioux saviour.